[EL] Will Republicans embrace the National Vote Planin 2012?

[Jack Santucci]

NPV messaging has always acknowledged (i.e., since 2006 or 2007, a.k.a. the
beginning of the effort) that the "partisan impact" of the American
electoral college varies from election to election.

I put "partisan impact" in quotation marks because the effects of
institutions are difficult to talk about without some reference to the
social/demographic/organizational factors that "condition" said effects.

And it is similarly difficult to talk about any of those
social/demographic/organizational factors as inherent to one or another
major party. For example, the Republican party is "rural," rural voters
concentrate in states that benefit from malapportionment, so NPV is a
Democratic thing. Or the other version: Republicans are more spread out,
it's harder to campaign in a spread-out setting than in a city, Democrats
inhabit cities, so NPV inherently favors Democrats. All this talk is
grossly oversimplified because the parties are fluid coalitions. Even that
point is oversimplified, since the notion of "coalition" assumes voters for
whom the salience of issues does not vary and/or is not manipulable.

Strong arguments for or against NPV look at the institutions alone. What is
the value of fragmenting the electorate? What is the value of delegate
malapportionment? What are the implications for election administration,
and are those implications good or bad? How about in the long run? So on,
so forth.

Jack Santucci

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:57 PM, <sean at impactpolicymanagement.com> wrote:

> The question can be asked the other way too - would Democrats, generally
> somewhat more favorable to effectively ditching the Electoral College
> through the NPV effort, suddenly rediscover the wisdom of the states as
> politically sovereign entities selecting the President?
>
> Sean Parnell
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael McDonald <mmcdon at gmu.edu>
> Sender: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
> Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 14:03:48
> To: <law-election at uci.edu>
> Reply-To: mmcdon at gmu.edu
> Subject: [EL] Will Republicans embrace the National Vote Planin 2012?
>
> There is an interesting early dynamic emerging in the polling this cycle.
> Romney is neck and neck with Obama nationally, but Obama is leading in key
> states for the race for the Electoral College.
>
> Some reasons why this may be true is that the economy is doing better in
> key
> battleground states, while Romney hurt himself with his auto-bailout
> position in states like Ohio. The economy is doing the worst in some urban
> Democratic strongholds, so Obama may be able to lose support in these areas
> while still winning these states by a comfortable margin. And Obama does
> very poorly in deep red states. In other words, there does not appear to be
> a uniform national  vote swing from the 2008 to 2012 election.
>
> This raises interesting questions: if Obama beats Romney in the Electoral
> College but loses in the popular vote, will Republicans change their tune
> about the National Vote Plan? Could we see strategic Republican state
> governments sign on to the NPV in the waning days of the general election
> if
> the dynamic I note persists?
>
> ============
> Dr. Michael P. McDonald
> Associate Professor, George Mason University
> Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
>
>                             Mailing address:
> (o) 703-993-4191             George Mason University
> (f) 703-993-1399             Dept. of Public and International Affairs
> mmcdon at gmu.edu               4400 University Drive - 3F4
> http://elections.gmu.edu     Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
>
>
>
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